Parking solutions

Dear Editor:

I have lived in Claremont for more than 65 years. I have owned a business in the Village for 40 years.

I attended the city’s presentation of the paid parking plan for the Village to the Village Marketing Group in October. My first thought was that if they sell this to the city council it’s going to last one election cycle, when that council gets voted out.

Charging for parking has nothing to do with any perceived parking problem in the Village. Sometimes it’s hard to find parking; sometimes it’s not. The city was just looking for revenue to help pay for its recent financial missteps.

Charging for parking is not going to add any more parking spaces. Paid parking would drive customers away. We’ve got one of the nicest small town business districts in southern California; it draws customers from far and wide. Why kill the goose that lays the golden egg? All my fellow Village merchants work hard every day to make the Village as great as it.

I do have a few suggestions that might help open up some parking.

1. Convert the city employee parking at both city hall and the library to public parking. Why should city employees and council members have their own spaces or be treated any different than any other Village employee? Open those spaces to paying customers.

2. More diligent parking enforcement.  It’s pretty easy to figure out which employees are parking all day in customer spaces. A few parking tickets would get them to the outskirts of the Village.

3. Cut back on some of the three hour parking lots to two hours Monday through Saturday. That may cut down on some of the shuffling of parking spaces by Village employees.

4. Two or three hour parking on Second Street between Harvard and College. I notice a lot of Metro commuters parking all day on Second Street.

5. Two or four hour parking on College Avenue between Bonita and First Street. That would get Metro commuters to park in the Metro lot.

Thanks to all the residents who have chimed in, I hope this has been squashed for good.

Mike Verbal

Owner, Pizza N’ Such

Claremont

Testing tickets

Dear Editor:

I am sure that other Claremont residents are as grateful as I am to Aundré Johnson, new resident and admitted scofflaw, for his advice on parking issues in our city, as reported in “City pulls proposal for paid parking in Village” (COURIER, December 21, 2018).

Let us hope, though, that Mr. Johnson will in the future restrict his extra-legal “testing” of the city’s law enforcement practices to ordinary parking laws, and not move on to laws regulating handicapped parking spaces, yielding to pedestrians, stop signs, red lights and the like.

Charles Young

Claremont

Careful what you wish for

Dear Editor:

The city council should be very careful with parking fees in the Village.

In spite of having made a few missteps, the city has succeeded in creating and nurturing a successful and popular shopping district. Scarcity of parking is a symptom of prosperity: a very good kind of “problem” to have.

I operated a business in the Village for more than 25 years—many of them prosperous years and some not-so-prosperous—enough to recognize that scarce parking is not necessarily the worst thing that can happen.

Solving the current (prosperous) parking “problem” with meters or permits or any other method of charging for parking is a recipe for disaster.

Shoppers like the Village as it is, but creating readily available parking by charging for it will simply drive those shoppers to other places (read Upland and La Verne) that they like where they can park without charge.

Rob Kurtz

Claremont

Village parking wars

Dear Editor:

The new Claremont City Council should be very pleased that enough folks come to the Village that the 1,446 parking spaces in the Village are occupied during peak hours.

The way to alleviate parking congestion in the Village is not to tax folks wanting to come and spend money, although a tax would likely reduce the symptom by discouraging visitors.

The city council needs to address the underlying cause, which is an insufficient number of parking spaces needed to accommodate all those who wish to visit.

I think that the Chamber of Commerce as well as venues such as The Press, Espiau’s, Whisper House, Walter’s and Eureka Burger would rather see a queue of folks waiting to be seated versus a queue of cars waiting to find parking spaces.

This whole parking tax proposal smacks more of additional revenue generation than of additional parking space availability.

John Yerger

(Claremont resident 1968-2001)

Pomona

Online poll on Trump

Dear Editor:

The government has been in disarray well before Trump took office. It’s just business as usual. Congress gets richer; Americans get poorer.

Catherine Greenbeck

Claremont

Start 2019 with facts

Dear Editor:

We know after almost two years that President Trump loves to take credit for all the good things (whether he has control over them or not) and blame others for anything negative. (Let’s see how well that mindset works in the real world of accountability!)

The DOW is a perfect example. I did a little snooping to see how his first two years stack up to Obama’s first two years, since undoing all of Obama’s “horrible” policies was at the forefront of Trump’s agenda in order to make America great again.

We do know that the market hates chaos and uncertainty, whether president-created or caused by macro economic issues, and we know that there are real cycles in any economy; like a roller-coaster, what goes up eventually has to come down, etc.

From President Trump’s first day in office (1/20/17) to the end of the year, the DOW grew just under 4,900 points or roughly 25 percent.

Obama’s first day in office (1/20/09) to the end of 2009, the DOW was up around 2,500 points, just over 31 percent, as the country was dealing with the Great Recession.

President Trump’s second year (through 12/24/18), the DOW is down about 2,900 points below its 2017 close, an 11 percent drop, and also a 19 percent or 5,000-point fall from its all-time high of 26,828 on 10/3/18.

Obama’s second year (2010, as we were still clawing ourselves out of the Great Recession), the DOW grew 1,150 or 11 percent. 

Now the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Reserve seems to be the whipping boy for all the ills of the market. The president would appear to believe that he could do a much better job running the fed or any other department that experiences any problems.

His non-stop tweeting and  blame-throwing at everything and everyone (except himself, of course), not to mention some of his policies, do not inspire the stable environment in which markets perform best.   

Don Linde

La Verne